As the NBA and other professional sports leagues work toward plans for when they’re allowed to resume play, one thing that seems clear is there won’t be fans at games to start.
But the absence of a crowd at games could just be one of many changes the sporting world experiences.
While no fans at games seems like a short-term change, Rich Kleiman, business manager of Brooklyn Nets forward Kevin Durant, said “Yeah,” when asked by CNBC if could see permanent change coming to sports, adding:
In the short term, I think societal changes will affect what our interest level is in terms of attending games. I think there’s been AR and VR technologies that have been in development that were slowly rolling out, that you may see sped up. Especially because we’re looking at fanless arenas and stadiums for the foreseeable future. So I think trying to engage the fan at home with more and more offerings. I think you’ll start to see that.
Still, Kleiman isn’t looking for too much deviation from the way things were in the sports world pre-COVID-19.
I’m hoping that, in time and when there’s more confidence throughout all of society and different therapeutics and eventually a vaccine is introduced to the world, that being in a stadium, being in an arena will never be replicated by being at home. So I hope all of that comes back. But in the short-term, there will definitely be some real changes.